Eastern Philosophy

>>8753225
Yeah, Tao Te Ching is a good start.
Although enlightenment through any form of literature is unlikely. (Why the "DIDNT THINK A THAT DIDJYA?" Posters are often confused by Eastern philosophy).

>>8753291

Its not enlightenment i'm looking for, but i want to see just how different the approach of the eastern part of the globe is to the western one, in regards to fundamental questions of the human, his relation to society, to politics, to his family, and so on.

>>8753225
Benjamin Schwartz, The World of Thought in Ancient China is a good starting point

Just watch Naruto. That's what they believe is real, anyway.

Van Norden's Introduction to Classical Chinese Philosophy pairs well with his selection in Readings in Classical Chinese Philosophy.

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>tfw to smart for Asiatic ontology

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>>8753847
>tfw trump fucks everything up and china takes over the planet

>>8753898

The chinese need a concept of International Relations before the western world triumphs it as the next world superpower

>>8753898
If you thought the Western corporate elite were self-centred and traitorous, you have no idea what the Chinese elites are like.

>>8754795
The Chinese corporate elite aren't in charge though. The Party is in charge and the Party might let elites in but it's never stupid enough to give them a set of keys.

>>8754949
China went from socialist to capitalistic under the party's rule. They cut themselves a very generous slice of the pie - they are the corporate elite.

What, did you think they had all that power sand said, "Let's give away our possessions, and create ambitious new rivals that want to cut us down to size"? That's not how corruption works.

Lieh Tzu is readable

>>8754967
t. foreigner who has never worked in a Chinese company

Confuscianism, and to a lesser extent Shinto and Shingon school Buddhism preach ancestor reverence and duty to family, that is what republicans site. they probably read a few Confucian aphorisms about heritage and called it a day. It's the same reason a lot of liberal politicians site The Brothers Karamazov as their favorite book, 'old book written by christian author' is all that most people would know about its plot, and that's all the politician needs

>>8754967
The term is corporatist, not capitalist

Fascists called it the third way for a reason, the government still has supreme power over the economy

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>>8754795
>>8754777

All right. Was persuaded by the book and it was a Korean who basically helped me to get my student loan paid off, so I thought they were all right. But I heard some horror stories over there as well about business also. So fair enough anon, I'll de-tfw that one.

bumping this interesting thread with excerpts Chicken Soup for the Confucian Soul. I bought this book, the Chinese said it was terrible, I enjoyed it, it's not super-profound, mock me, etc

>seriously tho keep going this thread is really interesting

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ulS-Wsb0IHs
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9kPERixWpnM

>>8758000
>tfw when I pointlessly conflate Koreans and Chinese
>tfw digging my own hole ever-deeper
>save me from myself anons

I know this might not be too related to the thread but seems like a good place to ask.

I want to learn about Buddhism but have no idea where to start, I've been thinking about checking out the Dhammapada but I'm not quite sure. Also I'm not particularly interested in a specific school of Buddhism (Therevada, Mahayana or Vajrayana). I want to learn about the philosophy of Buddhism, I guess.

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>>8758057
Just read and understand this.
Basically this is the only important work in the world.
Every answer is right here if you're strong enough to take it.

This is true religion stripped of all politics.

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>>8758069
Can confirm. Soho was the mentor of Miyamoto Musashi. Kind of a thing.

>>8758057
If you think you can learn about the "philosophy of Buddhism" without learning about specific schools you haven't done your pre-research.

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>>8758057
Saved attached from a previous thread. You may find it helpful.

>>8753225

this really good website called google.com faggot

>>8758266
This list wouldn't really explain Buddhist philosophy but rather the religious aspect of Buddhism.

>>8754949
uhhhh wasn't the prime minister found to have let like 30 000 members of his family have executive positions?
china is corrupt af too. their economy is also slowing down so they're becoming more repressive (a sign that things are not going very swell). eventually, they're gonna have to make a jump to being a service-oriented economy. it'll be slow. and very, very painful.

>>8758278
Also Buddhist philosophy is completely inaccessible unless you understand Japanese or Korean other than entry-level Zen historical/lineage texts.

>>8758284

Economy slowed down cause they couldn't maintain their GDP growth by building projects extensively that their economy and population couldn't keep up with.

Don't be such an idiot it has nothing to do with repressing them.

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>>8758292

>>8758328
You don't learn Catholic philosophy by reading the Bible.

>>8758284
>and very, very painful.
Would it be extremely painful?

>>8758292
Nice bait

>>8753325
If you have a truth boner you might not like eastern thought as much. Many philosophers and great political thinkers have a very "these words will make you think of x, which will get you closer to getting my point" way of writing, so you may find yourself struggling to accept some of what they're getting at.

I recommend you grab the book of tea by Kakuzo Okakura first, as it's short and was written to introduce a western audience to eastern thought by a bilingual Japanese Taoist between the world wars (so no possibility of poor translation).

Afterwards I'd go with the Tao.

>>8758284
Chinese corruption is different though. Not better or worse, but there's still a line between the corporate elite, the self-made "new rich", and the Party elite.

>>8758266
You'll need multiple lifetimes to get through that reading list.

>>8753291
I'm interested in reading the Tao Te Ching. Is there a consensus on what the best translation/edition is?

>>8758389
You think the two or three rewrites of Zen Mind every year is the pinnacle of Buddhist philosophy?

>Eastern "philosophy"
What the fuck happened to /lit/ that this thread is being tolerated?

>>8753291
>Although enlightenment through any form of literature is unlikely.

True but it helps.

>>8758443
>>8758443
Jay Garfield's translation and commentary of Nagarjuna's Mulamadhyamakakarika is great, as is Huntington's The Emptiness of Emptiness which contains a translation of Candrakirti's Madhyamakavatara. There is good shit out there and you're a snide shit hole who would rather assume posture of superiority than direct someone to something worthwhile. I bet you don't even know what you're talking about though.

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>>8753898

It would be much better, desu.

I find the post-political nature of Asian societies to be a relief.

I hate whenever I come back to be amidst this trench war of ideologies and some shitty group, be it alt right or BLM or whatever the fuck is new, stirring shit the next week.

And we don't get anything in return for it. What we get is this constant unease.
They have just as good a living standard as us over there. Not to mention it's much safer than over here.
Free speech? Who gives a flying fuck really. As long as the government provides. As long as you have a society based on laws and norms. What we get with all our bullshit is chaos constantly in a 50/50 fight with order. Over there chaos is mostly subsumed... And I like it.

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>>8758581

Of course I meant to say it's much safer over there.

I see a lot more cops here than over there. Be it Japan, China, Korea, Taiwan, whatever.

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>>8758401
First of all, i have to give a shout-out to my man here for sharing with us the words Truth Boner, which is absolutely top shelf. god i wish i could play guitar

>>8758581
I share your feelings. I lived in Korea for several years and found it to be basically exactly what /pol/ dreams about. The worst part about it was honestly the foreigners who acted like assholes and fucked everything up (like me, until I settled down a bit)...

I think >>8754795 is right though, and in my own experience (very limited!) i can confirm: the unease is there, but it's all managed and kept kind of out of sight. Comes with its own problems.

But yeah, I mean...I didn't intend to stay over there as long as I did, but it was really great. Never made it to Singapore but everybody I knew who did said it was the world's greatest city, hands down.

Maybe I should be working on my 2nd language skills...I loved Asia, I really did. In the *very* brief time I was in Japan it's not like that feeling went away either.

It's why I read Chinese philosophy all summer. Fuck it, maybe I'll get back into it again this winter.

Thanks for prompting this, kind anon, you're making me remember some very good times.

>>8758626

>The worst part about it was honestly the foreigners who acted like assholes and fucked everything up

What did they do that bothered you in Korea?

I was particularly bothered by the foreigners in Shanghai and Tokyo.
I never met more "muh dick" idiots than I did there. Sexpats truly. Not to mention the fact they get drunk/high on such a basis that it's not even funny anymore. They get the crappiest of the girls of course ( it's not a perfect world, but def far far better imo ).
But they're far from "cucking" Asian dudes. I saw lots of happy couples ( you probably too in Korea, they even dress the same haha ).

As much as this website tries to convince us blacks are the biggest degenerates.. Truly... Black expats are far more well-behaved than the whites there, believe me.

>>8758649
Basically just confirmed too many negative stereotypes about Westerners, and who failed to realize how outrageously good we had it. It was just a thing that I became more sensitive to as time went on and I slowly found myself just liking the place enough to want to be on the side of the general coolness of things, and try to respect it. I really liked the city I was in, the culture, all of it. Felt right at home after a while.

Saw lots of happy couples, although the same-dress thing never caught on among the foreign/native couples. Still pretty charming.

I didn't really notice any disparity among shitty behaviour, but I'm sure that black co-workers got the shit-eye from students. The thing is that you can actually see what might be called 'real' racism over there from time to time, but it's not like it is here, with people losing their minds over getting triggered and so on. Like students saying they don't like getting handouts with black people on them, and you say, don't be retarded, and they stop, and that's the end of it.

I never even gave two shits about politics or Trump or any of that while I was over there. Now that I'm back I fucking care way too much about it and I don't actually realize often enough how much I sound like an ass. 2015-2016 were pretty crazy years tho.

>>8758677

Made me realize Confucianism is a superior ethic and Taoism is a superior metaphysical outlook, without getting cocky about this realization towards others, or even start proselytizing. Not even gonna ponder if we should import it. Not gonna happen probably, Westerners will take their sense of superiority with them to the grvae, so why bother.
It just works for those societies. That's it. And it provides.
And all our crusades seem so petty compared to it.

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>>8758703
Nothing but agreement from me there sir.
I happen to really like philosophy and for me Confucianism/Taoism is awesome. I really love it. Don't get me wrong, the Western tradition is boss as hell, but I've gotten into a perspective of complete economic determinism at this point and Chinese thought makes me feel really centred about all of that. The Great Learning, Analects, the TTC, Xunzi...I don't know about the other anons in this thread but I thought it was super interesting. I read a lot of Western stuff first, and you always want to have a balanced perspective on stuff, but yeah, the East is a beast.

I mean, of course, with 1.3+ billion people I have no illusions that China is going to be no utopia. But Chinese philosophy gets me, as they say, right in the feels. And it is very pragmatic. I mean, any philosophy carries with it the potential for abuse and so on, but I have to say, Confucius gets me. I mentioned earlier that I enjoyed Yu Dan's book as well. It's not super-deep, and the Chinese themselves shit on it, but I liked it. Maybe just the way it fit in my hand. I don't know.

One of the best (and short!) texts I read was here, enjoy if you're into that stuff.
http://faculty.smcm.edu/jwschroeder/Asian_Religions_2015/textdownloads_files/Confucius%20chp1%262.pdf

Plus there's also Alpha Centauri's based neo-ubermensch Chairman Sheng-Ji Yang for vidya fun.

>>8758581
you're fucking retarded

Are chinamen even aware of their own histories? Doubt it.

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>>8758745
>>8758703
You guys live in the same Asia I do, right? Confucius fucked shit up over here. I know so many Chinese who are immensely unhappy because of the pressure placed upon them by their culture, Chinese who have friends who killed themselves in high school, Chinese women, for instance, who every week are lectured by their parents that they should quit their careers and get married and have kids already because otherwise they're going to be failures. Not that China doesn't have a great culture in many respects - it does, Daoism is the tops - but I think you're both romanticising this stuff a little much.

>>8758745
*a* utopia

Sorry anon, it's getting late over here and my typing skills are starting to go to shit.

>>8758751
Sorry anon. I know it's bad over there. I will admit to being still more on the romantic/sentimental side of things by nature, so I tend to get blown away by most things I read, esp philosophical literature.

I don't mean to trivialize life over there, b/c no doubt you have more experience with China than I do. So I'll admit to romanticizing this stuff to some degree because I feel so thoroughly exhausted with the West sometimes - was maybe just the buildup to this year (and, of course, the sense of what may follow from it). For whatever reason I find that thought very good at lockpicking the conceptual traps that Western thought I feel sometimes winds up in; and who knows, maybe it would be just as possible to see things the other way. I only have this one perspective, and I try to be as open-minded as I can.

Being in a conservative part of Korea, which is already a pretty conservative country, painted a good picture of things for me. But I know life isn't the same everywhere.

>>8758774
Korea seems a lot more...relaxed. Like China or Japan but doped up on capitalism. Over here it's crazy, and most foreigners are willing to blame Marx or Mao but really the biggest problem with China is that Confucius is still number one. Don't be sorry, though. Admiring these things too much is way better than the haughty tone most expats end up taking about Asian society ("why don't they just do things like us", etc.). It's good that you're so interested still.

You guys keep talking about how you saw the light, but what are your specific criticisms of the west? Not trying to offend, genuinely curious.

>>8758626
what's some good Chinese philosophy my dude?

>>8758806
Cool, thanks. It was pretty relaxed (well, when I left - getting pretty crazy there now, it seems). I also worked for a really good company, which is rare. So yeah, Asian thought still appeals. In the end maybe it's just that I'm sick of existentialism and deconstruction and I quietly like religion but not theology. Confucianism and Taoism (and to some degree the Vedanta) fit the bill. I'm sort of all over the place, but I try not to be a complete dilettante and actually try to have *some* idea of what I'm talking about. In that PDF I linked to above the author really nails what I like about Confucian epistemology, that's it's about conscience, the discrimination between possibilities, and not the tragic or fateful Choice that...well, I have some questions about.

I've been considering the possibility of doing some more overseas teaching, this time in China, but everything I read is depressing as fuck. I know a little bit about how foreigners tend to talk about their own companies, so I don't take everything too seriously. At the same time, etc. How are you finding it there? You said it was crazy, want to elaborate? Not that I want to talk too much about work, because I'm very happily unemployed right now and catching up on reading, but at some point I will have to enter the job market again and I had thought about seeing China first hand.

>>8758806
>Confucius is still number one.
yeah plenty of western people do not like this

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>>8758837
>maybe it's just that I'm sick of existentialism and deconstruction and I quietly like religion but not theology.
Ever check out pic related? He's like a French Xunzi, and ironically you can trace Nietzsche back to him through Flaubert (and then through Baudelaire).

For example he accurately predicted that science was a purely a dissecting force and advised that, like the Romans did with the Greeks, an empire ought to let a subordinate state in charge of that if it were to be long-lived.

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Wall of text inbound gents.

>>8758819
For me at least: too much second-rate Nietzscheanism, Heidegger I love but probably does not belong to the computer age, deconstruction is exhausting and I grew up on it, Baudrillard I like but his whole thing was a lament for modernity, Jacques Lacan I believe in but desire needs a little mystery, Rene Girard is where I am today but he says I have to read the Gospels and I don't want to. That's quite a summary but more or less it. I can go into further detail or specifics if you like. If you like my opinions (and who doesn't? hey now), there's a thread around here somewhere about the Frankfurt School where I am pontificating a fair bit on these things.

>>8758833
Oh man, what a question. I can only tell you what I've read and enjoyed.

1. The good old TTC. I like the Lombardo translation. Also the Wen-Tzu by Thomas Cleary, which is fucking incredible and totally slept on.
2. The Zhuangzhi didn't do it so much for me as I would have expected, but it does contain the story of Cook Ding, which is inexplicably wonderful. (http://www.bopsecrets.org/gateway/passages/chuang-tzu.htm)
3. The Analects, Doctrine of the Mean, and Great Learning. Plus Yu Dan, who is just cozy and nice to read.
4. The disciples, interpreters, and rivals: Mencius, Xunzi, Hanfeizi, and Mozi.
5. Sun-Tzu, of course. Once you realize he is a Taoist it makes more sense. Ralph Sawyer's book of the Seven Military Classics is also quite interesting.
6. Historians and other writers you can generally trust: Roger Ames, HG Creel, virtually anything translated by Cleary.
7. If you read all of that stuff you'll have earned the right to watch a few episodes of the based 2010 adaptation of Three Kingdoms, in which Chen Jianbin/Cao Cao steals all the scenes.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_8rkcJ5sYDI&list=PL46NnZF5rkhehGRuhnGUI0phBmYmFposP

That's plenty. And I loved this shit. I loved that they were thinking about war and peace, ontology, conscience, all of that. That they were relentless monists, and didn't go in for dualism or the linguistic turn or any of that. Chinese philosophy, so much fun.

>>8758866
shit thanks for the thoughtful post anon, got the analects hauled up now will get on it

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>>8758863
I love de Maistre! Never thought of him as being a French Xunzi, but that is a crazy interesting thought and I guess makes sense, now that I think about it. I also had no idea about the Flaubert/Baudelaire connection either...that's good stuff anon, thanks.

Gotta go with the awesome Vogelstein portrait. But yes, de Maistre is that dude. I read the reflections on France, part of the letters on the Pope, not yet the St. Petersberg dialogues. Completely looking forward to it, though.

Basically I used to think religion was for pussies or goofballs who couldn't handle Nietzsche. Thankfully I'm less obnoxious now. Religion actually seems pretty interesting to me now...

>>8758877
no problem, was glad you asked. enjoy!

>>8758866
I was the guy talking to you about Taoism in that thread.

>>8758878
Yeah, those guys were already contesting progressivism way before post-modernism came around. It's funny seeing who influenced who in Western philosophy because when you things get a lot less dogmatic. Take how Schopenhauer was dircetly influenced by the Upanishads. But nowadays it's been mostly reduced to Marxism, Nietzscheanism filtered through Marxism and some psychoanalysis.

Jung might be another guy you might want to check out if you're interested in religion as a form of social cohesion instead of repression.

Also Stirner as much of a meme /lit/ makes him out to be. If you can get a social plan that can address Stirner in any way you know you have a solid foundation, because he really doesn't pull any punches, runs with the assumption that men are a heap of desire, and leaves everything behind.

>>8753225

>Go wif the frow
>Be nice
>Obey famiry
>Respect aufority
>Become junzi

Wow I just summed it all up.

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>>8758928
Ah yes, cool. I looked into those excerpts you suggested, much appreciated. I presume you selected those specifically b/c of stuff we were talking about in that thread, which makes them more interesting than usual. Thanks again, that conversation is interesting.

It's funny, you're the second person to recommend Jung to me recently, and he's someone I have hardly read at all (although my father is crazy about him). And of course, there's Jordan Peterson now, who also likes Jung...noted.

Max Stirner...ugh. I read Ego and Its Own about six years ago and I really wanted to fling that book out the window. This was before I came to 4chan, where I see him popping up on /lit/ all the time. I really was glad to see the end of that book, if only because Nietzsche seemed to be so much more enjoyable to read. But different strokes, I guess.

Given that you are into the Tao, you might enjoy Heidegger. He was fairly well-received in Japan, and I've read a fair bit of East-West stuff where people compare his thought to Taoist stuff. He's famously dense at first, but then something clicked for me and the rest of it was smooth sailing.

I'm into psychoanalysis today, and I've started a couple of threads on /lit/ that seemed to be popular. There was one guy who was really into Hegel who was good to talk to. But yeah, Eastern philosophy...it makes a lot of sense in a kind of practical way, which is ultimately what analysis is supposed to get one moving towards. Economic determinism has for me kind of taken the bloom off the rose of much Western thought, b/c I just see capital, capital everywhere now, and philosophy doesn't have that nice feeling of reading the Republic and really feeling like you are thinking about the noble, wise, and good life. Deconstruction permanently monkeyed that up. Fortunately there's Confucius.

Or zen, if you just want to get right out. The Unfettered Mind is a good read, as >>8758069 suggested. I've always been tempted by the monastic life.

>>8758958
Anyways gents, it's getting late over here and I have to turn in. It's been a pleasure, thanks for making /lit/ the cool place it is.

>>8758401

Don't the asians have their own version of Plato, Aristotle, Rousseau? Don't they have a deeper understanding based on philosophical texts in regards to what is man (Is he an individual part of society, or a human part of the collective?), how and what should ideal politics look like in Asia and all that?

I basically want to find what keeps the Asian civilization alive in terms of moral, intellectual and spiritual baggage.


For example i know the Chinese are very collectivist. That they favor the group instead of the individual, and thus they put a big emphasis on things like family and state. But i was wondering if any of my assumptions regarding the Asian world are true, which is why i want to dig deep down and get a clear perspective on the cultural and social picture of the Asians.

Read the Mulamadhyamakakarika by Nagarjuna. I know, it's a mouthful

just a question, how old are you guys who are making all the sweet posts? You seem very knowledgeable and have a lot of life experience, and I feel like a relative pleb for knowing nothing.

>>8758958
>Max Stirner...ugh. I read Ego and Its Own about six years ago and I really wanted to fling that book out the window.
I can totally see Stirner being horrible if approached in a certain way, yeah. I think you need to be working on certain assumptions to really get all the juice out of him, because he builds up on Hegel and the discussions that were going on around him, so he's extremely compressed and has you reconstruct a lot. The first chapter of his book alone sets up a complete metaphysical and political stance in only a couple of pages, so if you trust your first impression it'll just seem like he's spouting a lot of nonsense in order to beat his chest--which is a part of what he's doing but far from all of it.

As for Heidegger, he's been on my mind. Specially his views on time and thrownness interest me. I'll check him out. I have to say, it's nice having omeone so eager around.

>>8758953
Seriously ... do the asians have no in depth philosophical treaties on government, politics, society?

Did they just rationalize the family and authority over the entire course of a couple of thousands of years?

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You guys need to get over philosophy, east and west.

Buddhism for Dummies, second edition.

>>8759297
I still don't get this book

>>8754777
That is a typical analysis, yeah. But remember 100 years ago that America had practically no international relations either.

>>8753363
Believe it

>>8759304
It's kinda sad they chose to public under the "for dummies" brand because the book is written by three leading academics.

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>>8759206
You mean just like Europeans rationalized God and Man for a couple thousand years (and still do).

Pretty much all Chinese phil has political content. Even something as poetic as the Tao Te Ching is intended to be a guideline for government. Rousseau's spiel was already a couple centuries old in China by the time it surged in Europe. "Chinese philosophy" is also far from being a Confucian monolith because you have at least three other big schools which are distinct from it (Moism, Taoism, Buddhism), and even then you have people inside of it which glaringly don't agree (Mengzi vs Xunzi).

Why don't you actually try to look at this stuff and see what you can do with it before complainng that it's not like what you're used to? Why the hell would you want the whole planet to be like the West anyway?

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>>8759206
In fairness, we've mostly been talking about Chinese philosophy here, but Eastern philosophy does include India. So maybe the Arthashastra is what you're looking for?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arthashastra
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chanakya

And you can read it for free right here. Enjoy!

http://www.lib.cmb.ac.lk/wp-content/uploads/2014/01/Arthashastra_of_Chanakya_-_English.pdf

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>>8760173
Got to love that typo, but English is probably not the first language going on there. Still tho.
What happens when you put Kierkegaard and Machiavelli in a blender?

Spies, that's what. Lots and lots of spies.

>Fiery spies, hidden in an underground chamber, or in a tunnel, or inside a secret wall, may slay the enemy when the latter is carelessly amusing himself in a pleasure park or any other place of recreation; or spies under concealment may poison him; or women under concealment may throw a snake, or poison, or fire or poisonous smoke over his person when he is asleep in a confined place; or spies, having access to the enemy's harem, may, when opportunities occur, do to the enemy whatever is found possible on the occasion, and then get out unknown.

Source:
http://public.wsu.edu/~brians/world_civ/worldcivreader/world_civ_reader_1/arthashastra.html

>>8759206
See
>>8758449
The concept of separating religious, political and philosophy is a western concept that didn't really catch on elsewhere.

>>8758401
Small correction, the book of tea was written in 1906 before the first world war.
Perhaps you might be thinking about the Russo-Japanese War 1904-5.
I think that's a great book, also recommended
Tao te ching as it's such an easy low investment.
Any book by Alan Watts or listen to one of his maaany talks on youtube, he has a great understanding of eastern philosophy and he will relay it in an occidental cultural context.

>>8758837
>and I quietly like religion but not theology

lol. Cuck.

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>>8760464

I'd like to see two things:

1) Eastern Philosophy meaningfully brought into the 21st century.

2) The gap between Eastern and Western philosophy bridged - to whatever extent possible.

>>8760787
>The gap between Eastern and Western philosophy bridged - to whatever extent possible.
see
>>8759297

>>8760787
There's no gap. They're all talking about the same thing. All humans are. Yes, even "those" people.

>>8760890

>Yes, even "those" people.

Get fucked.

>They're all talking about the same thing.

In very different ways. Compare Hobsbawm talking about Marxism to Deleuze/etc. Two very different interpretations about the same thing that need bridging.

>>8758958
>Max Stirner...ugh. I read Ego and Its Own about six years ago and I really wanted to fling that book out the window.

Quite ironic considering that's what Stirner thought, people should do after reading the book.

>>8753898
>China takes over the world

Nah, too much corruption and social and environmental problems. If they can't even fix their domestic problems, how can they be expected to rule the world?

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>>8760895
>Get fucked.
lol

>Compare Hobsbawm talking about Marxism to Deleuze/etc. Two very different interpretations about the same thing that need bridging.
Yes, but notice how those two people aren't from different continents? Differences in philosophy have more to do with the differences in the attitudes of particular people, than with distances in time or space. If you take a similar stance as someone you're likely to end up in the same place, come up with the same arcuments, refutations, proofs, analogies, etc. Now of course people are more likely to share the opinions of those around them than those not, and in that way you could talk about a certain national character, but the popular opinion isn't what we're discussing here.

Plus, let's be real here, how are we supposed to bridge that gap? All the Buddhist and Christian sects haven't managed it for their particular schools in a couple millenia, and you expect us to do it in the space of a 4chan thread? To order practically all of philosophy, and do it justice? Plus, what would we be bridging? Neither has one single doctrine which we can compare one to one, then you have the fact that they have influenced each other in various way, that the "East" is really "not the West" (i.e. most of the world), and finally that the whole thing is moving and developping in this very moment, right here even, and has been forever.

So if you were to actually do that you would have to take my first point, disregard my second, and don't think of it as a gap to be overcome, not taking the generalities that you can get as more than they are--and read the thread because we were already on it.

/lecture

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>>8760909
Makes sense.

>>8761005
You're right, and I can't really disagree. And to be honest you my whole post is pretty fucking stupid on review. Of course I have no real idea what could happen next. I mean, if Trump *does* blow it, and China *does* move into that position that people have been predicting will happen for a while, then, okay. But really tho my comment was bad and I should feel bad about it. Even I will admit this.

So what's the prediction then for China, and China vis-a-vis the rest of the world in the 21C? What happens next over there in the age of Trump? I'm curious about this stuff. You guys have seen the god of war statue, yes?

http://www.boredpanda.com/giant-war-god-statue-general-guan-yu-sculpture-china/

>>8758057
Essential Tibetan Buddhism - Robert A.F. Thurman

>>8761124

China is a pseudomorphized state subject to the Western world ( read Spengler ).
It's a Pontus-tier enemy.

I really don't expect much from China. Having lived there for a while, it's an irredeemable corrupt mess that is only growing because the West needs it and would be an African tier shithole if it wasn't for based tier Han genes.

>>8758837
Sorry for the late reply, maybe you're still here, anon. Personally I love China because it's crazy: it's very different to Japan and Korea and many foreigners bristle at that, leading to the kind of stereotypes people have about subhuman rude mainlanders, dog-eating communist savages, etc. It's rougher round the edges, sure, and there are many Chinese habits I hate, like spitting in the street or letting your children go to the toilet wherever, but those are country folk who've gotten rich too quickly, and as many Chinese hate it as foreigners do.

Working here isn't so bad. Bosses are the epitome of the "crafty Chinaman" stereotype but they also hate confrontation, so if an employer is funny with you all it takes is standing up to them, even politely. The only thing I really hate is the Confucian family stuff that makes so many of my co-workers and friends seem so perpetually unhappy (and is the real cause of the greed and selfishness that have infected the country since Deng). But it's relaxing, interesting stuff is always happening and Chinese people are mostly not the assholes you see in news reports. They're rough but always friendly (unless you have a Chinese girlfriend and they're an old man in a Mao cap).

>>8758806

Mostly American expats who still complain about everything even after 10 years of living there.

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>>8761502
>pontus-tier enemy
>my sides

Really? That bad? Damn. Nick Land is usually singing their praises, and he lives there. Guess I'll have to reconsider a few things.

I had to pleb it up on wikipedia to remember what pseudomorphosis was. It's been a while since I read DotW but Spengler really is awesome. It's the grand style - is there anything grander? - and it always gets me. I have a long document on my computer somewhere with pages of quotations from him copied out of that book. Every once in a while I think of him saying: *fuck philosophy and literature, study engineering, learn business skills...* etc. Hard to deny the truth of that. Especially these days. Although apparently Michael Puett's course on Chinese philosophy at Harvard is pretty popular. He's another one of those guys that can go on that list above, a really smart dude.

>>8761076
Also, good post. I still kind of think that transhumanism might eventually be one of those things that link people together, but these are just conjectures. I kind of feel that cultural differences are more pronounced the farther down the economic ladder you go, and that as you go up people seem to magically find ways to get along with each other. Remove scarcity and you remove I think a lot of other stuff that people are inclined to call culture. I like culture, but I'm becoming fairly jaded (that is to say, full of ressentiment directed the wealthy and *apparently* happy...).

My hunch is that at some point it will be necessary to produce a limited sort of one world order and an automatic planet regulated by a board of directors. Washington, Moscow and Beijing all run varieties of state capitalism today and potentially for the long haul, so I feel as though in the long run corporate logic wins out over national interest by becoming one and the same on a planetary scale. So more like Brave New World than 1984.

>hot takes heah, getcha hot takes

>>8761502
Doesn't Spengler classify it as an ossified civilisation similar to islam?
You might be right about the pseudomorphosis though, at least socialism as the Faustian will to power, dogmatic morality has destroyed the husks of already internally dead cultural forms. They seem to be going for the second religious phase what with he the spread of Christianity and other Western-imported ideologies, and the rampant lack of any other values than money and power - thanks to the turmoil of past few centuries and Mao - was the straw that broke the camel's back.

What do you think about the Japanese? Spengler doesn't classify them as a great culture, but their relative isolation, huge population (tens of millions already in the Middle Ages) and almost simultaneous development with the Western culture with similar projectory for a long time seems to point that way?

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>>8761653
No worries, and that's very illustrative and helpful anon, so thanks. I don't like Crafty Bosses but hopefully I won't make the same mistakes I did before. And generally even when they were Crafty they weren't so bad. In general I have to say that I really liked the Koreans. Was probably very lucky, but hey.

>tfw these fucking things tho
>tfw literally shit-posting
>feels bad man

>>8761728

>Nick Land is usually singing their praises

Yeah but he lives in Shanghai, which is honestly China's Alexandria. Everything about it is un-Chinese. It would honestly be like some Greek singing the praises of the Egyptians as the new master race while standing in a city that is obviously Hellenic.
The rest of China is a Chongqing-tier dystopia of corrupt moneygrubbing cut troaths.
And still doesn't make sense he's singing their praises as he's probably breathing in the fumes of progress each day.
I guess the sight on Pudong still gives him a boner even after all these years.

He also mentions HK a lot, but most HK millennials you meet don't want anything to do with his "neo-Sinosphere" narrative and would rather be a liberal democracy than his post-carbon based lifeform/disembodied autism governed technocracies in telepathic contact with Yog-Sothoth.

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>>8761739

I should say I was probably just making too rapid a Spenglerian conclusion about modern day China.
They might not be a Pontus... Most of the world is ossified and I think you will never ever see Cultures pop up in those places. Which doesn't make Spengler a cyclical historian, otherwise after the decay of a civilization you'd figure a new spring would come, but nope. Nothing of the sort he claims. His theory is more like an Aristotelian one of sorts, where he's seeing parts of the world develop a form language and as soon as it is developed, it goes on indefinitely until something destroys it utterly, never to develop something new again.

But yes, China is an ossified civilization ( same as India ) and I think that being as such, they only reanimate themselves when they appropriate the vitality of younger worlds ( barbarians ) around them. Like how Rome basically borrowed from lesser cultures to tend the weakning fire.
A bit like how they saw this short surge again after removing the Mongolians ( the travels of Zheng He ), but soon after lost their motion again... And then it was the Manchu's turn to take over the country... And then barbarians on boats.

The Japanese. Hmmm. Well I read a good essay once by a Spenglerian dude, who said Japan is basically a bit like Carthage, a Mesopotamian remnant that still lived on while the actual world had died, and in this case a Tang China remnant with autochthonous elements. There's a case to be made for that as a huge chunk of Tang China still remains in Japan. Even obscure tantric shit like the self-mummification of monks that disappeared in China after the Tang.
We should also remember that Spengler never equated civilizations/cultures with ethnicites, but more as "worlds", which could encapsulate many ethnicities. Pretty much like how France, England and Germany are Faustian, one could say that China, Korea, Japan etc. are .. well.. dunno, I guess the "Sinosphere" you could call it, without making this as being solely the merit of "god tier Han genes".

>>8761728

>Although apparently Michael Puett's course on Chinese philosophy at Harvard is pretty popular.

Well that's because Puett is basically selling students a neo-Stoicism.
It makes total sense from a Spenglerian perspective that this would catch on in a late imperial pahse.

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>>8761823
>it would honestly be like some Greek singing the praises of the Egyptians as the new master race while standing in a city that is obviously Hellenic

You are on fire today my man.

And millennials. God bless 'em. I get that completely - neo-Sinosphere stuff is really only appealing to a very small number of crypto-fascist libertarian software programmers and other outer-fringe DE visionary types anyways. And the alt-right is going to command the narrative there now anyways for the next couple of years.

Seriously tho, I may have to rethink some stuff. Basically my whole trip for the past few years has been, The Sky Is Falling. Globalization, right? All signs pointed to disaster (esp if you read the Lord of Collapse himself). So Chinese philosophy still looks good for me, because I guess it helps me to remain balanced and sort of self-coherent in capitalist disneyland. Whether it actually helps to build thriving economically viable civilizations - well, is this not an interesting thing to think about? As I have learned, things are not so easy, it's not always so easy to hate on the West...this feels very true.

Now Trump is in, and we all get to wait and see what happens next. But I will be thinking about what you have said, since it sort of deprives me of a romanticized Chinese alternative and that is by no means a bad thing. It is in fact a very welcome thing, as learning new things often is.

Goddamnit, capitalism. Why are you so horrible and so interesting? Posting some stuff from my variously cyberpunk/NRx/w/evs collection.

>>8761880
That it would, anon, that it would.

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>>8761880
For what it's worth I am a literally card-carrying member of a Stoic webgroup, although this was before I discovered Nietzsche and I haven't been active with those guys for a long time. Stoicism is sometimes called Greek Buddhism, for anyone following this thread who is looking for more East-West connectivity stuff. Maybe explains why the Chinese work for me as well as they do.

>Spengler

Neck yourselves

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>>8761890

>So Chinese philosophy still looks good for me

It's no surprise it looks good. It looks good to me too. You're a late phase kid like all of us. Why would we feel any appeal to these anachronistic religions and philosophies?
It's really fringe individuals ( le autists, as they're called here ) who are stilled fired up about these dated ideas. Most people retreat into the New Age, which is basically what you would have found in Rome and Alexandria in the centuries after Christ as well.
Some are already beginning with something that looks like a Second Religiousness, but it's still too early. Lonely mystics and such, but it's mostly lonely nihilists still now... Although this meme magic stuff among isolated individuals might be the beginning of that, my gut tells me. But that's a whole other discussion.


>only appealing to a very small number of crypto-fascist libertarian software programmers

Lol, very true. They just project their idiosyncratic ideologies unto that part of the world.
Look how much of a joke those frogposters on twitter are with their idpol-tier "otherkin femo-anarchist check muh pronouns" intro's, only you get "neo-reaction monarchist with a dash of ancap". It's fucking silly and looking at all the cults that spawned in late Rome ( check out the Glycon cult f.e. )... it's no surprise really we get this as well.

If you have a conversation with the average Chinese, they're more interested in your culture than theirs. I know the Tao Te Ching better than any Chinese I met.
They simply don't care. They wanna watch our movies, series... Dress like us. Go to concerts like us. They don't even read as much... Make money, fuck bitches basically. Land should maybe go to a Shanghai club and see for himself how 'leftist degeneracy' is right around the corner.
After that accumulation of wealth, they'll probably look to us again... And already are. I know white chicks giving pilates and yoga classes in China. So there you go.

>Now Trump is in, and we all get to wait and see what happens next.

Speaking of that... This dude is also a Spenglerian and he wrote in march 2016: http://cultural-discourse.com/donald-trump-a-few-more-words/
Especially pay attention to the last words of that essay. It's easy to be critical of predictions and say "well, lucky shot", but there's something about Spenglerian thought that is always accurate. Like the way he predicted communism would just dissipate in Russia etc.

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>>8753225

Since you only care about what you a priori "identify" with, may I suggest Dr. Seuss?

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>>8761929
I'm not the Spengler-anon in this thread, but I really don't understand this perspective at all. Have you actually read Decline of the West? It is *stunningly* good.

>Today we live so cowed under the bombardment of this intellectual artillery (the media) that hardly anyone can attain to the inward detachment that is required for a clear view of the monstrous drama. The will-to-power operating under a pure democratic disguise has finished off its masterpiece so well that the object's sense of freedom is actually flattered by the most thorough-going enslavement that has ever existed.

I just pulled that basically at random. That book was published almost a hundred years ago and yet that still sounds pretty contemporary to me.

More good stuff here:

https://www.goodreads.com/author/quotes/88483.Oswald_Spengler

>>8761954

Most of the anti-Spengler people on /lit/ haven't read him.

They're usually people were told Spengler is "kinda fashy" and will therefore ignore him, but will totally excuse an outright nazi like Heidegger because muh academia.

>>8753225

read marx faggot

>>8759002

Yeah so the Tao, Lotus/Diamond Sutras, etc.

Sadhana by Tagore is also really nice, but pretty recent.

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Gotta start with the classics

>>8761954
Spengler is just a collection of snappy, vague babble, there's nothing *stunning* about it. A knock-off Nietzsche.
>That stupid quote about the roman soldier in pompeii
It has nothing to do with whether he was a fasc or not, there's just nothing there. Heidegger may be a Nazi but he's interesting and insightful, not some tryhard "historian".

>>8762003

You really sound like Adorno when he was bitching about Spengler.

>wtf this sounds dumb, why use language like that, for real

That's not a fucking argument.

>>8762007
Spengler's verbosity isn't the problem, just the fact that he has nothing to say. What's so amazing about his silly, opinion based classifications of cultures/civilizations?

Spengler wrote a history book without being a historian, and was summarily BTFO by every scholar in the Western hemisphere. It's a fun read, but don't expect to get any profound learning from him

>>8762021

You're making an aesthetic case here. You don't like his style. Ok. Good to know, I guess.

>>8762026
Can i see where he was BTFO?

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I think you guys are jumping the gun with Trump. You think the vote for Trump was something like voting for a Hitler or a Napoleon, but what it was was a vote against the current establishment. Trump has no momentum as a "leader" because America is trying to come out of warring and expansion, not into it. The word with his supporters is always against globalism and for making their country "great again" through internal development. It isn't changing your religion, it's cheating on your husband because you've become disappointed in him. It's superficial and not meant to mean much--like Trump himself.

The most important thing to come out of this election is the fact that the internet has managed to establish itself as a better medium to reflect the popular opinion than the larger media.

>>8762026

>was summarily BTFO by every scholar in the Western hemisphere

I like to know who.
Adorno isn't "every scholar" and his anti-Spengler text was mostly this "sounds like astrology to me" bullshit aesthetic argument we have in this thread here. The best critique he could come up with was that capitalism was still progressing. Well no shit, dumbass, Spengler didn't say the decline would happen tomorrow..

>lol, we have tv now, so Adorno-Spengler 1-0

>>8761993
Chapter 2 verse 47, i live by that rule

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>>8761971
I guess so. I've definitely been That Guy who tries to explain Heidegger, and now I'm the guy who tries (stupidly) to explain Trump. Not even root for him, just try to explain how this happened...this is always rewarding, as I'm sure you can imagine. I do this to myself, mind, because I try to take the long view, but you wind up taking the side of contrarians and a few months back it almost got the shit beat out of me and a friend of mine by a gang of native american guys who weren't so much feeling my lettered take on the world today. Protip: don't get into the finer details of US politics at 2AM in a Pizza Pizza after you've drunk an entire bottle of Jameson's.

Anyways.

>they simply don't care. They wanna watch our movies, series... Dress like us. Go to concerts like us. They don't even read as much... Make money, fuck bitches basically

Yeah, this too. I have friends who went to Oman after ROK and said basically the same thing: the sheikhs want to drive cars in the desert and whoop it up. The sex-laws stuff are so prohibitive that my buddy told me a guy he was teaching over there literally sold his car for a dirty phone call. Shit you can't make up. And then I see Muslim guys on TV saying, We need the West, we need to modernize, we need to be more like Japan...shit like this.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hZZMXV_PRXk

>>8761941
Glad to see I'm not alone on this stuff. And it's true, you get as much stupidity on both sides of the spectrum, which is what was going on in that Frankfurt School thread before...there is no being on the right side of history, and there's nothing cozy or comfortable about the long view either. I used to imagine that reading enough would actually suggest a course of action, but jesus fuck all I can come up with now is, 'don't be cynical.' That is literally it. It's from Sloterdijk. Clearly I suck at philosophy.

Ah yes, Ebert, I've seen some of this guy's videos before. He's a Spenglerian? Neat. I like that he's got a YouTube channel with talks on just about everything. I was into the PEL podcast for a while, they're aight too.

But holy shit, you're right, those last two paragraphs...fuck. He called that one like Babe Ruth.

>>8762026

>wrote a history book without being a historian

So did most historians in history.
You "certified scholar" losers with your overpriced degree will never ever be of value to Western civilization.

>>8762035
>illiterates are the ones that defend Spengler

It all makes sense

>>8761816
Koreans are alright. Sort of thin skinned and temperamental but they have good hearts.

>>8762061

Modern literati are useless fuckers anyways.
Bunch of social climbers thinking they're living a better life than most because they happen to have a different style of consumption.
So profound, so esoteric you are. Maybe we should pay more attention to you, the champions of the working class you disdain.

You're the same smug motherfuckers who run the media, the whole culture industry, and are now pointing fingers at everyone because reality didn't fit your shitty models.

You're the last ones we should listen to, bourgeois snake oil fuckfaces.

>>8762056
i am a history student and this triggers me

>>8762072
I'm starting to doubt that YOU have read Spengler

>>8762076

I'm a history graduate and this doesn't trigger me.
The professionalization only started in the 19th century, dumbass.

What I'm trying to do is give some god damn well-earned credit to our pre-modern predecessors who didn't have a piece of paper that said "4real historian"... And also to non-historians who write about the subject... They can have extremely valuable contributions as well.
This type of smug hostility isn't helpful to the debate, it's only good for your god damn ego as the "pro academic".

>>8762078

Why? Be specific, dork.

>>8762040
All true anon, well said.

>>8762095
i'm not any of the anons you replied to earlier, what is great about Decline of the West. I'm interested in it but amid all this backlash I'm not sure. Is it worthwhile, and why?

>>8758581
>Free speech? Who gives a flying fuck really.

Well then you can say au revoir to posting inane opinions on Cambodian shadow-puppetry forums.

>As long as you have a society based on laws and norms

Hate to be that guy, but define "norms."

>>8762101

What makes it worthwile to me is that Spengler is not necessarily "right" in predicting the outcome of civilizations, that to me isn't his main value ( even if his model tends to do so ), but that he is approaching historiography long Hayden White came along.
He has this notion that the telling of history is best approached as an art form and not as a science necessarily ( which is what the humanities have been trying to do, and failing to do so, namely: act and be like a positive science ), since humans are story-telling creatures... So our history should be told like a story.
Spengler did/tried that and of course then you get those stuck-ups ranting about how it's all too esoteric. Well, no shit. But then again, why even bother with dudes who think marxism is a fucking science.

In the Abridged version of DotW it is said he once described himself to a friend as "Dichter" and not as self-proclaimed historian.
This shows he was ahead of his time in this realization that history should be written (again) as an epic and not in this German positivist way or Annales tier crap.

Now of course this is totally lost to the so-called literati, who are supposed to be on board with that approach, but to maintain their own snobbery as "men of science too" would rather go for the old-fashioned style of a Von Ranke.

>>8762143
alright, you've convinced me to look into reading him. is he a fun read though?

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>>8762101
I'd say it is. Despite what >>8762003 says, I found it to be much more than a knock-off Nietzsche.

Bear in mind that Spengler, like Heidegger, are both immediately in Nietzsche's shadow here. Part of the reason why I think it is not only unfair, but wrong, is because plainly Nietzsche cannot be imitated (and did not want to be). Spengler wrote his thesis - interestingly rejected for lack of sources, which given the subject is kind of ironic - on Heraclitus, who is another philosopher Nietzsche liked.

Here is one of the big ideas in Spengler that I liked: his theory of culture, which he uses with a seasonal analogy. Cultures are the young, strong, vibrant, poetic forces that eventually metastasize and become Civilizations - big, rational, materialistic, technological, money-oriented. It is at this point that they begin to die, after hitting their peak, and this is a kind of idea that Heidegger will echo: that the twilight of a culture can be much longer than its youth. And these were the ideas that turn of the century German mystics and philosophers were all thinking about, up to and through the first world war. Quite possibly one of the most extraordinary eras of intellectual ferment of all time, paved the way for a great deal of 20C philosophy to come, and Spengler's gigantic history is all smack dab in the middle of it. You cannot possibly ask for a more epic story, and the prose delivers.

Spengler-anon can probably be more specific than this, but these were aspects of DotW that I liked.

Plus, of course, this bomb-diggity quote from Man and Technics.

>>8762095
I wasn't being smug or hostile? I don't think you need a degree to be good at something, but in my own experience I'm not sure how I could ever be a historian without the skills I've learned. I hate smug academics too.

>>8762072
You are massively trigged

>>8762147

To me he was.
I think his style bothers the more 'rational' types. That's why they rather hail a dry academic type of discourse instead of Spengler's attempt at telling the story.

>>8762143
>>8762150
Thanks guys, well thought-out replies. So according to Spengler, at what stage of development would you posit Euro-American civilization to be at, considering Spengler estimates a civilization lasts around 1000 years. Would it be the end, since the major nations are showing signs of no longer being ok with the presence of minorities in their midst (one of Spengler's criteria for a vibrant culture was tolerance of ethnic diversity)

>>8762172
i like narratives. the idea of an overdetermined (sorry for that word) narrative of history intrigues me. where should i start with spengler?

>>8762152
>>8762164

Yeah, I admit I was.
I just hate all these shitty attempts at attacking a thinker who deserves a better critique then "he wrote like an NPC in Skyrim".

I really hate this neo-eurocentrist attitude where hyper-rationalism is the only game in town. Partly it's Zizekians infesting the humanities.

That Slovene is fucking up a lot, let me tell you. He might be an antidote to idpol and PC in the academia, but his "let's go back to old-fashioned eurocentrism and fuck Jung and fuck eastern thinking" is really damaging.

>>8762187
I know about Spengler other than that his secretary jumped in front of a train

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>>8762179
The winter; the end. Again, though, the end can last a very long time. It's not necessarily the end as in, run for the hills. Simply that the end too has its place in the order of things, and is there for a reason, and comes with its own set of rules.

It's worth bearing in mind that I think this is one of the misunderstood things about Spengler: he would not have argued for overreaction, simply a frosty and Gothic-heroic apprehension of what all of this meant. He was courted by the Nazis, but turned them down, and predicted in 1937 I believe that they would not last ten years. Quite a prediction (as was Ebert's call on Trump above...Spenglerians, man. They see plans within plans).

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>>8762179

Well he believed we were only starting with the late phase, so we have a couple of centuries to go... if not indefinitely ( so the global civilization might indeed be a thing, forever ).
That's what China and India did. They were sealed off, mostly, from other high cultures to completely destory them.
In that sense, barbarians who invaded played the role of the nomads in Ibn Khaldun's theories, as enemies whose energies you could parasitically appropriate to revitalize the decaying state and city.

For Spengler, the real threat isn't warriors on horseback or hordes of Vandals hopping the fence and burning your cities, it's your ossified world being overgrown by a new young culture.
Which is what happened to Rome: the "Magian" world was bursting through its body like the xenomorph in Alien.

>>8762143
>He has this notion that the telling of history is best approached as an art form and not as a science necessarily
Spengler doesn't have this notion. All history before Spengler was told "as an art form and not as a science". That's exactly why scientifically based historiography is important.

>>8762208

He does have it. It's in the fucking introduction for crying out loud.

>That's exactly why scientifically based historiography is important.

It's only important when it comes to studying the sources.

The actual writing: go full bard or go home.

>>8762219
Spengler didn't invent history as a story and not as a science, that was the norm for basically all human history.

>>8762231

He brought it back in modern historiography, which was already a century past that approach.
That's his value.
But he was ignored and it took us all the way to White before we realized the importance of telling the human story as, you know, a story.

That might look like an unimportant point, just a change of style, but as every writer knows, the act of writing itself already creates a perspective you didn't discover in the primary experience/source.

>>8762219
>The actual writing: go full bard or go home.

I like this, anon.

>>8753898

>even more Chinese pussy to go around

I literally cannot find anything wrong with this.

>>8759297

Wtf is this. Suggesting pic related negates philosophy is like saying that the Illuminatus Trilogy negates neuroscience

>>8761124
imo China is going to gain track on the international stage, once the increasingly popular christian religion is adopted by the mostlyt middle class young chinese people who want a more laxed and individualist alternative to the confucianist pressure from nowadays chinese society.

And once the christian concept of right and wrong takes root into chinese culture maybe we'll see how China takes over the world, and maybe even bridge the gap between eastern and western thought that's been mentioned ITT

why do chinese love Christianity. it seems retarded for a westerner to cling to this.

>>8762829

Why did Europeans love a religion that came from the middle east too? It makes about as much sense. The local pagan religions were just great until this militant regime swept through and it looks like there's another middle-eastern abrahamic religion trying to repeat history in europe

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>>8763009
Yep. I also think that late-Roman cosmopolitanism gets slept on. Everybody was more or less free to worship, so long as they didn't fuck with the Pax. As we saw, some people took issue with this. And in the end, recall that they seem to have *won...*

I'll give a story idea I was messing with for a while away here for free: paranormal investigation in Silver Age Rome. Imagine the cults, the stuff that people would have up to. It was pouring in from every corner of the world. Just look at that fantastic tangle of symbols going on there, the semiotic knot of imperial mass unconsciousness. All those symbols come from someplace, and they converged on the City Eternal. Granted, it would not have looked quite as hi-def sexy then (get rekt reality, simulation master race reporting in, etc.), but when you get to look back at it...

>ffs pls kys you pretentious cuck this fourth-rate prose is making my eyes bleed literal hitlers
>tfw i cannot tell a lie

Life was getting mighty complicated, and the guys in charge were feeling compromised trying to keep an impossible geopolitical and philosophical peace on three continents. And incidentally one of the most under-appreciated emperors basically pulls an 11th-hour Not On My Watch and puts some quick duct-tape on the whole shebang by slapping the shit out of pretenders across more or less the entire known world. Gave the empire a whole new lease on life, for better or for worse.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aurelian

God-author(s) bless you, magnificent /lit/ bastards, the ferment here is quite delicious today and I am a raging faggot for this kind of stuff. I mean, I'm a raging faggot in general, but this is cool too.

The next big superpower is gonna be in Mars.

>>8758423
Red Pine translation is the best. By far.

>>8762582
>a more laxed and individualist alternative to the confucianist pressure from nowadays chinese society.
yeah but just the western secular humanist stance can provide this, so why going for a god?

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>>8763579
>yeah but just the western secular humanist stance can provide this, so why going for a god?

I don't know, does it though? Does secular humanism make you feel relaxed? I can only speak for myself but it honestly makes me feel anxious as fuck b/c it's based on Enlightenment stuff that I think leads imho back to globalization: pure reason to me seems like pure economic determinism. What's more logical, sane, and free than free-market capitalism? Nothing, right?

That system thrives because it seems to logically necessary, and then melts down when the pie doesn't shared equally, and everyone goes looking for scapegoats. I'm not a Marxist, mind you, but when people can't share things get predictably exciting.

On top of that there is some interesting reading here about the myth of religious violence, which I admit is to open up a pretty massive can of worms. The modern state itself, Cavanaugh argues (in a different work) appears out of the chaos of the Thirty Years' War, and was actually intended to be a check on the ambitions of princes. A few hundreds of years later I would be inclined to say that most political life comes always-already materialistically determined, and the task of the media is to make us believe that these things are about transcendental ideas rather than the manufactured scarcity required for the system to produce profit. And thinking about this shit is giving me a stomach ulcer.

A guy like Deleuze, for instance, will explain capitalism by reference to Spinoza, who was talking about God (and did it in such an on-point way that he was accused him of heresy). Today it's not so crazy to say that capital *is* a kind of demiurge itself...and to be honest religion looks more attractive to me, and not less, partly because of this. The individual anterior to society is to me the central problem. People like to think they are individuals, but we are all stuck in this leaky boat together...

https://www.hse.ru/data/2013/01/24/1306281470/cavanaugh_introduction.pdf

>>8763665
Good lord, the typos in that post. I really do need to edit more carefully, my apologies.

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>>8763665

>>8758928
>>8761941

Paging the Tao-anon and Spengler-anon ITT (if they are in fact different people) for their thoughts on this also. Have to head out and won't be checking this thread for a while, but in the meantime /lit/ is the everlovin' tits

>>8763665
Holy shit that graph is awful

Has Spengler been wrong about something? His philosophy seems too accurate for me, there has to be something wrong here.

>>8762135

4chan's not blocked in China

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>>8763579
Because G-d is in THE HOLY BIBLE you fat fedora autist dripping with sweat in your mother's basement. Pic rel8ed is how I imagine you to look like right now.

>>8758423
>>8763550
You've got to be careful, they're so many BAD translations. Mitchell's, Le Guin's and Garon's aren't even translations, avoid them at all costs.

>>8758750
Are white men aware of their histories? I doubt the normies are

>>8764927
pls respond

I have to say this is one of the better threads on /lit/ right now

>>8765567
>OP asks for books on eastern philosophy
>anons give him banal entry-level suggestions like the Tao Te Ching for a few posts
>thread devolved into le ebin Nietzean history man circlejerking

>>8765500

I can't recall all of his predictions, but most of the ones I can think about have came to fruition.
From Russia abandoning communism by the end of the century, to Nazism not lasting a decade... And the dawn in the West of strongmen like Trump.
So when silly Marxists, who for decades have thought the worker's revolt is about to happen any day now ( remember in 2011 they thought the global revolt against capitalism was upon us ), saying Spengler is a hack... Well, what's their track record?

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>>8763665
>>8763765
I think we need to determine what are the basic assumptions and metaphors of our culture. For example, why we think "belief" is all that important, or what we mean by "reason" at all, has been escaping me for a while.

How is belief in God or Democracy more important to us than belief in Bigfoot? Now the latter might seem more banal than the former, but is it in all circumstances? If you're lost in the woods and hear some unrecognizable scream, are you going to care more about the President or the Sasquatch? Is a monk required to be thinking about God when he goes to the toilet? We equate thinking that something is "real" (another adjective that escapes me) with support or care for the issue, but anyone that has played sports or videogames knows that something doesn't need to be real to matter to them. But when it comes to aesthetic art we find time and again that it must be "real" in some sense, either through presence or aplicability to experience, to matter to us; or rather to justify it to each other. So the highest visual art is regarded as the one that is most magnanimous while not loosing realism, the highest music is the one that entrances us to the point of orgasmic ridicule, and the highest literature is that one which touches on everything with a magnifying glass. Now this might not be the case with the mainstream nowadays, but it remains the case that one feels shame for not having read Tolstoj or listened to Beethoven, if one isn't an ignoramus. People are too intimidated to even approach this stuff, actually. Is it really that weird that they would rather be oblivious than risk not liking what they think they should like? Who are they to go against a couple hundred years saying Moby-Dick is the best thing ever when they at best feel bored by or neutral about it? They're not gonna go against the presuposition that Man should enjoy the great works of art, the best of the best.

And it's always the best. Our art is exhaustive. Our science is exhaustive. It must be to survive in a world in which God is not possible anymore, because our knowledge of God, by design, could have never been exhausted; "God of the Gap" is the battle cry when one justifies God by ignorance: it misses that God was always precisely what escaped human comprehension and manipulation.

So we teach our children to be curious. So we don't blame our scientists for coming up with atomic bombs or anthrax. So we say to the student or to the artist that effort comes first, and chastise them when they are lazy--we tell them to be the antithesis of a genius, which is a person who, often through outer possesion, has managed to make more than most with the same time on Earth.

And then when someone doesn't fall into these preconceived notions from the get go in their reactions, they are "irrational" to us. At both we must follow the commandment of exhaustion and cannot believe the world hasn't been already exhausted. The problem must be with the person.

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>>8765956
Now these disertations are nowhere near through. I don't pretend they could ever be. I don't see the benefit of my knowledge being total when my life is not over yet and other lives will come after me. I say let the lives of "all men" be lived by "all men", not just one. Do we really need representatives at all? Socializers and mediators will always be necessary, and ambassadors too, but do we need presidents? Isn't it a bit too idealistic to expect to find a man that can represent millions of people accurately, without serious loss? Would that person not be a boring average? If they were the best of us and we were to strive to be like them, is that not yet another problem, because how can that person have a position everyone wants and still be sane? Why are our elections such rash popularity contests? Aren't vital matters like that to be decided in the most cool headed way possible? Yet because they are important people can't be unsentimental with them--just like the artist can let himself starve because his art must come before anything else.

Likewise we treat money in the most superstitious of ways. Nowadays money doesn't even have precious metal behind them. But let someone say the economy is wrong and apparently the planet is in flames. From my window it isn't, how about yours? People cannot conceive of someone doing good in a depression; they might even be embittered by that success. And if it's a banker, watch out. Apparently this society of individuals is dangerously connected. But not in all cases. It's all very confusing. To point out in a way or another brings problems. Get rid of the way and there are no problems. Embrace the problems and you find the way. Which one do you choose? Which one will you choose tomorrow?

To finalize with a point about money. People can simply use it to signify their support or interest. A lot more would need to be outlined about societal change than one post allows me, but you already sort of see it in the internet nowadays, with funding sites. I mentioned the internet when talking about Trump exactly because this technology we're using has so much to give still. 4chan too, seems like it has so much to give.

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As for the person/s who like/s Spenglers artistic vision of history, my recomendation is to read (on) pic related. The kind of world it proposes and the process Flaubert went to write it is fascinating.

an introduction to Zen Buddhism by DT suzuki is not a bad place to start.

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>>8765956
>>8766057

This is really wonderful stuff anon, there's a lot to think about there. I will admit to still having too much of a latent collectivist bent; beyond a certain horizon it's far too easy for concern to become a form of tyranny in which one ends up destroying individuality and differentiation for the sake of a greater good that really is just a kind of shared oppression. And it's not a good look. Counter-Marxism still carries with it all the same dangers and plot twists. It's why I prefer Rene Girard these days: mimetic theory really helps me realize stuff that much conventional political theory otherwise hides.

>nowadays money doesn't even have precious metal behind them. But let someone say the economy is wrong and apparently the planet is in flames

For me this is part of what makes all of this so incredibly interesting to think about. Affluent Westerners (and by comparison this doesn't even mean the 1%) really live on Planet Desire. Whatever you want, whatever you could possibly want, it's there. Go and enjoy (and the Freudians will say, of course, that the injunction to Enjoy is where all the problems begin.) For me I have noticed a funny pattern in which culture tends to inevitably dovetail with advertising, Content, whatever. Coming off the gold standard is certainly an interesting moment, but we are now in a kind of zero-g libidinal economy where everything floats relative to everything else, which is why theorists have a hard time planting any flags on the terra firma of the real. It's just not there: the world runs on fantasy, romance, and dreams. And it is - for me at least - the peculiarly unsharable nature of these (whether it is legit political romanticism or even just market economies based on fulfilling desire that overextend, stagnate, etc) that I find dangerously fragile, precisely because they seem to me to be so ill-understood. But it does warm my cockles to think that there are others, such as you and other anons, who are also thinking about this stuff.

>funding sites
I've spent some time thinking about this too, how much Kickstarter changes the conventional perspective on capital. That Chris Roberts, for instance, can ask for 2m to produce his vision and receive 40m...I love this. It really signals a kind of change for me at a deep level, that we now have the tech (and arguably, the culture) to change the way we look at all of this stuff. That you might receive vastly more money than you expected to receive flips the whole idea of reasonable and predictable prices on their heads. That you just can't know how attractive your vision is going to be to people, for instance, is kind of amazing. To be fair, of course, it is possible to argue that receiving more than he asked for has made life more complicated, rather than simple, for CR...but that's a whole other thing.

>>8765582
see
>>8758866
>>8758069
>>8760173

pic not related

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>>8766853
I also think, for what it's worth, that "culture" nowadays is a term for "secular religion" except without much of the problematic discourse on sacrifice, for instance. As that graph above suggests, the individual anterior to society is kind of a thing. A culture is a sort of phenomenon laid over top of reality, a shared and co-constructed mimetic phenomenon, which when I want to be really cynical I will say is pegged only to capital in the long run. But I know that there's more going on than this, and that these may simply be the growing pains and hunger pangs of 21C life. Things will change.

>>8766248
This is a good recommendation. More links:

China-related:
http://www.indiana.edu/~p374/Analects_of_Confucius_(Eno-2015).pdf
http://www.indiana.edu/~p374/Daodejing.pdf
http://www.indiana.edu/~p374/Mengzi.pdf
http://www.indiana.edu/~p374/Daxue-Zhongyong.pdf

And also a very good book on Japan, about which not much has been said in this thread. *Mono no aware,* it's kind of a thing.

http://www.palgraveconnect.com/pc/doifinder/view/10.1057/9780230615489

Get yourself a nice, commented, version of the Zhuangzi.

It's very much worth the read.

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God-tier thread.

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>>8760909
This reminded me of one other thing I wanted to share: Guy Debord's taking this to a whole other level. He had Society of the Spectacle bound in *sandpaper* so that when anyone removed it from a shelf or put it back in it would destroy the covers of the books that were next to it. Too funny.

http://architectures.danlockton.co.uk/2007/11/19/destroy-everything-you-touch/

Book available here in defanged PDF form.

http://www.antiworld.se/project/references/texts/The_Society%20_Of%20_The%20_Spectacle.pdf

>>8767054
Balls, it was actually the Memoires...that's embarrassing. Ah well.

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To atone for my sins, then, and because it hasn't been mentioned yet: the Hagakure.

http://www.csn.ul.ie/~arise/stuff/hagakure.pdf

>>8767054
Where does Guy Debord fit into the conversation that's going on in this thread? Is he a worthwhile read?

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>>8767404

1/4
This is going to be a rather long post, so make yourself a cup of coffee and get snug.

Beyond the amusing anecdoate I would say that Debord is def a worthwhile read, but I should first explain why, because it will also help to explain why I keep shitting up with text-walls what would otherwise have been a nice and simple thread about Eastern philosophy book recs. And also that on days like today I am glad to be unemployed.

So let me say first that I am basically working with a gripe: too much mass cultural-political life is economically determined. This is 110% open to criticism, but I am genuinely not trying to defend this position or valorize it. This view, which to some degree I have acquired from Nick Land, *depresses the ever-loving shit* out of me, which is why I talk about on 4chan. I want to be wrong and I am confident I soon will be. So basically I’m trying to work out the last dregs of a very, very late-Marxist-esque point of view in order to move beyond it completely. This is perhaps what Fredric Jameson - more on him in a moment - will call a vanishing mediator. Felt that warranted mentioning. Also they namedrop him in Ghost in the Shell, which I thought was pretty keen.

Debord matters because he’s working and writing in a very interesting period, postwar France, right around the time when modernism is starting to become self-reflexive: that is, it is becoming postmodernism. He is a contemporary of and surely an influence on Baudrillard, who I would claim, like Nietzsche, is something that I believe today we must overcome or at least struggle with (and good luck wrestling with the Neetch, because he really is the final boss of philosophy, but you have to play the game…right?) Debord, like Baudrillard - and even earlier Heidegger (see pic related), Spengler too - are all noting that mass media and mass capital and mass technics have become a totalizing and systemic operation.

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>>8767835

2/4
At the time that guys like Debord were writing, Hegel, Marx, and Freud were more or less the theoretical core of the critique of capital and modernity. For myself I would say that those days are long past today, because sadly universities too are corporate entities and everyone needs the money and I think this impacts the criticism. After the tortuous year 2016 I have an incredibly dim view of mass social change: not that it isn’t sincere, just that it does precisely the opposite of what I believe somebody like Foucault would have wanted. Watching BLM skirmish with organizers at the Pride parade, for instance, was depressing. Who wins? Who can afford to give any ground? Well, nobody: so along came the Trump Train - first, mind, it was Moldbug and NRx - but that too I suspect is going to be drowned out in alt-right scapegoating in the long run. That is another thing, however, and it is way too early to make predictions like that. I’m no Oswald Spengler, and that stuff belongs on /pol/ anyways.

What Debord noticed (well, Nietzsche first, as always, and then Heidegger, and then later Baudrillard, and many, many others) was that consumption was beginning to have recursive effects on culture. What they intuited then has become in recent years completely obvious, to my mind. Western capitalism has transcended all else to become a planetary phenomenon. Capitalism is the revolution which succeeded. Your money and your credit will be good anywhere, and nobody will ask you too many questions so long as your cheques don’t bounce. All this is to enter the world of Zizek and the critique of ideology. But culturally the word for this is postmodernism (Or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capital).

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>>8767846

3/4
Enter Fredric Jameson. Jameson had a yuge impact in China, b/c he was the guy whose book on postmodernity the Chinese read. It’s a standard work in the West, but it was a phenomenon in China (from what I understand, anyways…) And this is still a very hot topic, because postmodernism and the doors it opens messes at a fundamental level with another equally powerful, and far older, cultural imperative: the Tao itself. So on the one hand I do think that in some way Chinese political thought (and it is possible that this goes right down to the way we parse a logographic language, as opposed to an abstract box of 24 letters) requires a kind of 1:1 correspondence between the subject and the text, which postmodernism is going to confound. Gratned, it’s not like the Chinese are strangers to this kind of stuff: the Tao that can be named is not the true Tao, and this has been noted by anons in this very thread (>>8758928). So Jameson, who is a big deal in the United States in his own right as a venerable Marxist literary critic has a reputation in China which is significant because postmodernism and Chinese thought is a question that is still going to be playing out for long time to come. http://www.chinasource.org/resource-library/articles/postmodernism-and-its-effects-on-chinaNote also this, in that pic above ( >>8763665) that Confucianism - interestingly - does *not* appear. What does this mean? Perhaps that all of those political structures derive from a concept of the individual anterior to society, which a more family-focused Confucian perception dismisses a priori, and which brings us back to the main ideas we have been talking about in this thread. This is one of the reasons why it is germane to consider a lot of these questions with a view to Eastern thought in mind, because for myself I would say that this notion - the individual anterior to society - is basically fundamentally inscribed on Graeco-Judaic-Western cultural DNA and is the source of many of our problems - especially since, as you will be told, and with perhaps a little too much confidence and certainty, that God is Dead. That may be one of the reasons why Lacan feels that psychoanalysis did not catch on in Japan (but why Heidegger was received so well). Or why the Oedipus complex, this cornerstone of Freudo-Marxist analysis, still describes a very Western-individualist perception of things that, however deconstructive it becomes, still falls short of the universality that much infuriatingly opaque Western thought attempts to produce.

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>>8767857

Sorry, it got a little scrappy there in that last post. My apologies. Just slide a break in the middle there between that link and Note Also. Moving on...

4/4
Of course, Deleuze and Guattari blew much of this to smithereens in Anti-Oedipus and A Thousand Pleateaus. And there really is no extant criticism of those guys except from Lacanians (who have their reasons for trying to keep analysis intact), spec-real guys (who I’m kind of wait-and-see on) and Alain Badiou (who is an ultra-Maoist, and I’m not entirely sure that’s the way to go either. But who knows?)

Finally, there really has not been enough shine for Japan in this thread. Inoue’s book Evanescence and Form is good, as is Suzuki’s. If you like Heidegger, Japanese thought will be attractive. Japanese philosophy is really very interesting, and honestly I find their concern with evanescence and dissipation to be really on-point when it comes to thinking about how perhaps to live in the capitalist disneyland we inhabit without losing your marbles.

Okay, that’s it for me today. Hope that wasn’t too obnoxious and pedantic. Was just very happy to have an opportunity to respond in depth to something I am pretty interested. Thanks to anon for prompting this excursus, and to any brave souls still following this madcap adventure into Continentia. Good luck out there today gents.

>>8766853
>beyond a certain horizon it's far too easy for concern to become a form of tyranny in which one ends up destroying individuality and differentiation for the sake of a greater good that really is just a kind of shared oppression.
Yes, that's my problem with Confucian societies. People end up subject to a system that by design shouldn't be questioned or opposed. It's a good way to gather people, but it feels dishonest, hollow. The system only survives because people are told to make it survive. Respect for our ancestors is one thing, but one has to wonder if they got their lives handed down like you'd be or if they shaped their lives in reaction to their conditions. I don't see what's particularly commendable about waiting like the soldier like Spengler proposes, when you have a good feeling it's pointless and don't care for the door yourself.

>It's why I prefer Rene Girard these days: mimetic theory really helps me realize stuff that much conventional political theory otherwise hides.
Yes, it really is a useful way of looking at things. Thinking where and when and in response to what a particular thought or wanted arised in my mind is always a fun excersize. But let me point something else out: the distinction between nature and culture is yet another of the assumptions that keep our concept of the individual in place. It's a really blurry one at that so you see scientists always fighting about whether this or that trait is biological... because somehow then it would make it right to shape our society around it? People think of Nature as a sort of unchanging God, based on their Laws of Nature, which are precisely what they find when they look for what doesn't change in sensual reality. So they fear for the revenge of the almighty idol when they have hurt it--kind of paradoxical because something almighty couldn't be opposed in the first place, right? There's talks of the human condition in art when the whole difficulty of it is that the appearances we receive are fleeting, that we're not sure this idea will be accurate or not forever. So that seeds distrust of our own perceptions (see Descartes) due to a purely supposed eternity; what follows is competition of experiences, then people, ideas and so on. We try this sort out desperately until we eventually give up on actually doing it right; there you have the pass from the state to the free market. Eventually the free market will be left behind too when people find a more specious master.

But this is where the real fun begins: If this system is so logical, what's there for you to feel bad about? What's bothering you? Let me refer to Stirner again: If Logic or Logos want me to take their cause and bend the knee, then they're honestly welcome to come make me do it.

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>>8766853
>Affluent Westerners (and by comparison this doesn't even mean the 1%) really live on Planet Desire. Whatever you want, whatever you could possibly want, it's there.
This is the very demiurge you talked about. The idea that this satisfaction should be there, funded on a life time of satisfactions, for desires which weren't necessarily your own. And again these satisfaction are always thought of as being the big, exhaustive moment.

So dissatisfaction gives way to creating something that will satisfy. It's not really that horrible an arrangement, when you think through the possibilities. The problem araises when all you have is possibility.

>which is why theorists have a hard time planting any flags on the terra firma of the real.
For me the question is whether there ever was or is real at all? There's obviously share world-views, but is that the same. Or if you're referring to the Lacanian real, aren't we actually choking on it a lot of the time? Are we not constantly told not to opine, not to reduce the issue? Is that not blind faith in words? Isn't society precisely there to help humans deal with what they can't understand or overcome?

>That you just can't know how attractive your vision is going to be to people, for instance, is kind of amazing.
There's another related phenomenon, that you often find a tase for things you didn't even imagine could happen. To me that's even more enjoyable, because it escapes all kind of control or expectation.

>>8753225
start with al ghazali

What eastern philosophy book would you recommend to read at least once in your life?

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>>8767878
I like some of your stuff though you darted all over a little.

>Capitalism is the revolution which succeeded.

I agree with this 100%. I think it comes from the fact that no one realized it was creating a new myth or cult around materialism hence everyone welcomed it as everyone wants the ability to buy food and even trinkets. I think the 21st century will see a returning to tradition in affluent societies. As they realize accumulating more wealth wont make them happy they will begin to search around and they may end up with a traditional lifestyle similar to their ancestors. This plays into the new rich in china. They are between Marx and wealth. Not really belonging to either but will slowly turn to tradition. I also think the West will as well. Consider the FN in france, they make a pilgramage to a monument of Joan of Arc. Latin mass is also growing in leaps. I see this as part of a returning to pre-enlightenment societies. The behavior is starting to turn now but the philosophy hasnt caught up yet.

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Does he actually say that all of this story is true? How could he. When you read the end-notes it sounds like he really believes and implies everything that happened is legit.

This book is a classic, and heralded by many as their favourite book, when in reality it has more "magic" than in the entire Bible. Not that that's necessarily a bad thing, but it is confusing.

>>8769596
thats for the reccomendation, do you have any others based around hinduism, i've read bhagavad gita, yoga sutras, and the upanishads, and iv'e just brogh your recomended book,

>>8769378
>I see this as part of a returning to pre-enlightenment societies.
yes, this is due to the relation of the plebs with science, not physics, but with biology/medicine. The plebs have been trained to associate scientists with proofs and truths, but the few scientists who cared about this have long given up on the justification of their work, and once the plebs is in direct relation with them, the plebs sees clearly that scientists do not know much.
Of course, this does not work with abstract works like physics, but it works very well with scientists working directly about what matters to people, ie the health of the plebs. People still get ill and they always love to claim that it is not the end of the world to have such or such illness, like aids, cancer, herpes, but they are dying to hear that some medicine is available, then they discover the side effects or that the medicine does not work for them, or that the doctors themselves never ever reach a consensus on anything.

Liberals have two main justifications for being in power: the rationality-as-freedom [the typical humanist thinks that you gain freedom by studying nature, or like Hegel, by studying the society] or freedom alone [do what you love, but do not enslave people mmkkkay, because explicit slavery is bad mmmkkkay [though, no liberal can answer why is slavery bad]] through the secular/medieval version of the human-as-individual will, then will-as-libido, with necessarily the means to fulfill the libido-as-identity [meaning a market, with people providing the means of the perpetual libido counteracting the failure of sustaining pleasure, typically failure by boredom]. people think that the failure of having the means of acting on their will is a slavery.

With the explicit failure of science as means of universal agreement/reality.objectivity/reason, It could seem that liberals fall back again on the lack of justification of them taking power, whereas at least the kings had their lineage as justification, but liberals have the best justification of their behaviors: manage to make people that children are under direct threat + ''act for the sake of the children'' = you can do whatever you want. Everybody agrees that it is wrong that a child is sad.
Liberals sanctify children, because they make so few of them (because it is a drag to make plenty of children] and people love to think they are not degenerate of most of their life. yesterday, the liberal said that slavery was bad because it was a crime against humankind [but there is nothing wrong with killing people (called enemies or even more dehumanized, a threat) who explicitly do not share your opinions on humankind], Today, slavery is bad because you do not want your kid to be a slave, you want your kid to follow its libido [but not libido as gate to pleasure, libido as identity].

>>8769999

Like any hedonist, Liberals fear the explicit pleasure, so they disguise the libido as ''personal identity'', and they fear the lack of control of this identity, like in disclosing their medical records on the internet, or the state spying on them.

THe problem of the identity is that, like any concept, it is a fantasy and its realization is doomed to fail, by its nature and because other people will prevent it, and here it is even worse since the libido changes perpetually. The identity and the libido behind it become a drag [because it changes constantly and you hardly have the means to follow it and even worse, it does not kill boredom(because it is the other side of boredom]] and people want to feel good about themselves by clinging to something more selfless, mode devotional. this is where you have the famous dichotomy''there is nothing after death''/ ''there is some universal soul/spirit.consciousness after death'' (typically from the theists] like the least esoteric Buddhists recall and escape and in which westerners try to find a society, a political system. TYpically the chinese society would be this, with the love of the liberals of ''a dynamic, a becoming, a path instead of of a stasis of being, a destination'' but of course there is no explicit humans rights in this so liberals are disappointed, so they just stick to ''mindfulness'' for their daily activities (explicitly hedonistic or not).
The children are a concrete way to show that the parents are devotional, committed to something bigger than them [the family, the community, the society, the nation, the mankind, the god] and this level of devotion offers enough of a reason to live on a daily basis and to create their public/private institutions.
The more you include children in your behavior, the more you like it and so it is natural to include the children of your children, then since rationalist love to turn finite sequences of anything into countably infinite sequences of anything, these people end up with all the future humans on earth and the more they think about this the more they approach the question of why live, which brings them back to the beginning of disguising pleasure (too much explicit pleasure and you become nihilistic and even worse, you see that you do not have the means to sustain life,which becomes thus ''survival'')

>>8769999
>>8770002
So what would be your way out of this?

>>8754777
>what is africa

?

how about the rest of asia?

>>8770002
>best post in eras. i like you, my friend.

>seeking eastern philosophy
>never heard of cachets
srsly guys?

ALL U NEED TO DO IS READ MUSASHI

>>8770326
AFAIK there's no permanent basis to their African shenanigans. It's sort of an extract and run job.

They should be focussing on winning the Nanyang chinese over - they are the only real Chinese colonialists there have ever been. But the friction between them and the mainlanders is considerable. They're not considered "real" Chinese. Compare this to the fairly deep-rooted relations between Canada and the UK, or even between the US and the UK.

>>8767115
Can you explain why it's worth anyone's time or are you just another memeing weeaboo who never had an original thought in his life?

Just read this thread.

All of you except maybe one or two goodposters are completely terrible, especially that autist who utterly misread Spengler (Papa Oswald would disown him).

Let me say that again.

PRETTY MUCH ALL OF YOU ARE COMPLETELY TERRIBLE. LIKE HOLY SHIT, HOW DO YOU MANAGE TO BE THIS BAD?

/lit/ is shit lately, and has for a while. And bringing philosophy and history into it is a good fraction of that.

Start with Confucius

>>8758423
I like Thomas cleary's translations.

>>8770707
Thanks for your valuable contribution, sperganon.

>>8770707

Tell me where I got it wrong then instead of signalling your superior knowledge of the man's ideas.

And philosophy and history have been an integral part of /lit/ for a long time. It's hard to not mention history, philosophy, sociology, psychology or what have you... when you're talking about literature.

Maybe that's hard to grasp for your spergass.

Bum

The Tao of Pooh is very nice !

>>8772608
Did you read the squeakquel, the Te of Piglet?
I found in my first reading that it got a bit technical and less light-hearted, but it was still an edu-taining read.

>>8773526

I unironically love this post, it's beautiful. My only concern is wondering if "squeakquel" might be going overboard.

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why are chinese so mean?

>>8773660
Who cares about lions. Those guys look like they're having fun.

>>8773660
The great-grandparents of most mainland chinese lived in the Iron Age.

>>8758581
Nick Land, go home. You're drunk.

>>8753225
Should I read Journey to the West? Is it meaningful or just a story? What is a good translation of the book? About how long is it?

So much pseudo intellectualism ITT it's actually hilarious. Basically what >>8770707 said.

>>8762040
There is some truth in your observation. Trump is a modern day Crassus. A Caesar has yet to show up.

buddhism is so drowned in pop-philosophy type books by memelord authors (thich nat than) and so shrowded in lore (monks, enlightenment) it's virtually unapproachable for non-faggots. I've tried several times to actually understand what is going on but listening to confusing ching-chong lectures and weird pointless "buddha speaks" stories on accesstoinsight it's fucking confusing

>>8753225
bro, just smoke out and listen to alan watts

>>8773996
tru tho

>>8753225
Sounds like you'd like Sun Tzu's Art Of War

>>8773982
not it is not

>>8753225

I took a comparative philosophy class. The textbook we read (of course , this wasn't /all/ that we read) was World Philosophy: An East-West Comparative Introduction to Philosophy by H. Gene Blocker

Suggest

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> So that seeds distrust of our own perceptions (see Descartes) due to a purely supposed eternity; what follows is competition of experiences, then people, ideas and so on. We try this sort out desperately until we eventually give up on actually doing it right; there you have the pass from the state to the free market. Eventually the free market will be left behind too when people find a more specious master.

This is really good.

>There's another related phenomenon, that you often find a tase for things you didn't even imagine could happen. To me that's even more enjoyable, because it escapes all kind of control or expectation.

And this.

>If this system is so logical, what's there for you to feel bad about? What's bothering you? Let me refer to Stirner again: If Logic or Logos want me to take their cause and bend the knee, then they're honestly welcome to come make me do it.

Can't argue with this either. Just here to salute a point well made.

>>8769999
>>8770002

This is super-interesting, thank you sir.

>>8770697
I mostly think about death, desire, and violence. So I like Guys With Swords, and samurai are some of the swordiest dudes out there, and this is a book all about that.

The larger conversation for me is about capital, technology, and Planet Desire. I like the Hagakure because its ideal posits an alternate set of values to the classical liberalism deeply inscribed on basically every modern form of political organization (see >>8763665) which is now a Western-planetary phenomenon rewriting the history of the planet 24/7, and which I come to 4chan to talk about.

I'd rather talk about those ideas than defend myself against the charges of being a weeb, b/c what does it matter. Japan is neato and mimesis is too. Would be hard to argue that I am not a memeing weeaboo. And I used to think I had original thoughts, now I realize I don't. Frankly original thoughts were banal horseshit anyways.

>no doubt, your recent thoughts are horseshit too
>tfw

The point is that we are talking about the revolution which succeeded: Western liberalism, with all that it entails. A feudal society, by comparison (and it doesn't necessarily have to be Japanese) espouses a different set of values; not only is the individual not anterior to society, but there is also not the same injunction to Enjoy, which produces a different culture and one I think is worth thinking about.

So that's all. Feudal cultures are not liberal cultures, and that's enough to get my attention. In fairness, Japan isn't exactly the economic superpower today it was in the 90s. All that is true, and as >>8761941 has written, and which I agree with, it is not a good idea to overly romanticize Eastern cultures.

Liberalism is a good look, but can it last? I don't know. Personally, I think limiting and controlling and reigning in the injunction to happiness is important, but I'm highly skeptical of whether or not that is possible, because that stuff drives the world economy.

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>>8774275
The *early* 90s, I should say, and it would have been more accurate to say the 80s anyhow. Nor should anyone overlook Japan's economic stagnation today because they give us so much dope nerd shit that we all love. The point here is not to be romantic or counter-romantic, but to try and aim for the truth. Felt that warranted mentioning.

I mean, look at modern Singapore. It would be hard to argue for a more straight-on rags-to-riches success story. After the Second World War they weren't all that different from Sri Lanka. Decade by decade they catch up to the present: natural resources, then manufacturing and tech apprenticeships in Europe, then sophisticated computer parts, then wealth management, and now next-gen science and all the rest. They had one stern and brilliant Confucian grandfather at the helm most of the way and look what they produced.

What happens next? Who knows. But they definitely did something right, no?

http://www.mas.gov.sg/News-and-Publications/Speeches-and-Monetary-Policy-Statements/Speeches/2015/An-Economic-History-of-Singapore.aspx

>>8763665
What a horrible chart. What's the point?

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>>8774569

>>8769999
>>8770002

Well, to some degree this anon has already explained this; the paradoxes and contradictions of a worldview which proceeds from the notion of an individual anterior to society, and the subsequent and all-too-logical pleasure-seeking sensibilities which arise. In general we take freedom to mean the freedom to pursue happiness (at least, I do), but this I would say is a fundamentally paradoxical if not impossible goal. Z has done a pretty good job of explicating this from the Lacanian point of view. Analysis fails, however, in Japan, but this is not to say that analysis as such is a failed project. Cultures and the thought they subsequently produce are different. The East has different priorities germane to the conversation.

The world in which we live today is, to my mind, one which is described more or less in terms of the classical liberal sensibility: Enjoy. But not only do I think this is problematic to the point of impossibility, it also produces a great many of the geopolitical or cultural conflict points that appear on the nightly news.

I like Girard, but I can't really say that everyone should go out and read him immediately. I got to him because reasons. But I think mimetic theory looks at the concept of desire without immediately binding it to a Marxist event that would topple the system of capital and the libidinal economy which drives it. Nor is there anything wrong with being a shoulder-shrugging Objectivist either, I suppose: the man who freed me up, if only temporarily, from total wage-slavery was a former construction contractor who got into a new market, and there was a place for me in his system. I'm happy things worked out for both of us.

If desire is mimetic, it would cheer me up to think that someday we might come to understand the planetary ecology of these desires and their long-term relationships to economics and arguably deep ecology, which is another subject that interests me. I'm not a Christian, but I think that

a) the modern/rational state arises out of the chaos of religious violence in Europe;

b) our modern political consciousness is informed by the existentials telling us - importantly - that God is Dead

Put those together and you have everything you need for a smoothly functioning globalist enterprise. Which in itself is not a bad thing, except that economic corrections for scarcity produce wars, civic unrest...in a word, geopolitics (and theory). So...

>what's the point?

I don't know. To consider this stuff? Talk about it? See if I'm crazy? See if anyone else is also thinking about it? As I said earlier >>8767835, I'd rather be wrong than right about much of this. It's not the sunniest perspective, and it's not like bitching about it is helping either the world or my own situation. If I find out I've it got all backwards, I can change my course of action. If I find that others agree with me, in some sense - as at least one anon in this thread has, then...

>>8774569

Put another way, what I am getting at is perhaps a critique of postmodernity. That, I guess, would be to answer your question more directly and succinctly.

>>8770002
Can you explain what you mean with "liberals". I'm not from the US, and basically our liberals are very different I think than you guys describe it.

>>8774771
well today you have as many liberalisms as there are people on earth, to the point of saying ''liberal'' is too ambiguous, like you said, but I refer to typically classical/new liberals/libertarian.
I do not distinguish those two historical liberalisms, because I see the goal under my generic liberalism as nothing but the oscillation between, historically, social liberalism (typically called the left) and classical liberalism (typically called the right, because they need to associate themselves with ''conservators'' to exist (because the plebs do not care much about libertarianism when it exists alone in the ''center'')), election after election, up to today.

The history of the western humanism is a long topic so just read this
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_liberalism
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liberalism
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Age_of_Enlightenment
and I do not care enough about those doctrines to be precise

Those who come after descartes, bc descartes is typically seen as the guy who stop Aristotelian logic. I do not distinguish social thinkers (which comes always last, because a doctrine turned into some form of society is always the pinnacle of a doctrine since the greeks (they quest a merge of a personal philosophy with a social philosophy) from philosophers, from intellectuals/scientists.
I would say that a liberal/humanist is typically somebody who do not like explicit concentration of heavy powers, unlike in monarchies (monarchists love to think they are '''the right-wing'' today), who tries to define ''freedom'', but positively, because he thinks that it is not enough to define freedom negatively (as in ''freedom from something (typical a master or desires or whatever makes you impotent to achieve your choices (because the liberal loves to believe in >muh freedom of choice))").For 300 years liberals-in the US-senses and libertarians-in-today-sense have claimed to be different, but they are just the same, just disagreeing on what positive freedom is. This is this freedom that destroys them, once you compare them to buddhism, taoism and the like from the greeks, because in those doctrines, freedom is just freedom from desires, it is the negative freedom that the liberals think is barely enough (at best you meet this freedom in the liberal-rationalist fantasy that ''scientists deals with truths and thus should be objective (meaning no personal opinions, feelings should be in their work)), but for buddhism and the old greeks, freedom does not really belong on a social level, it is just personal and you cannot create rules/laws/conventions which make performatively people free.

so typically the liberals-against-monarchists are on the left, but today there are so few monarchists that, this right has vanished, that the left constituted by liberals-against-monarchists as been widening, like a flower which blooms, and, to catchup with the beginning the oscillation above, nowadays you only have a ping-pong between the two historical liberalisms.

>>8758292
see
>>8753291

Got the pocket-sized Tao Te Ching from Shambhala, translated by John C.H. Wu. Finally a version I can easily access outside.

Is this a decent translation? It's missing the Chinese text but also any commentary.

>>8773562
And I love you, anon.
When Piglet talked in Milne's books, it sometimes referred to him as having "squeaked" - o-oh dear something something, Piglet squeaked.

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>Asian people discover cuckoldry

BASED

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L5r9yZmdurQ